Perhaps this would be a good time to sit down and think about whether being an MP is really his thing, since that involves slightly more than jumping up and down and yelling about stuff you don’t like.

One wonders why exactly Te Ururoa Flavell though this would be a good thing to say.

However, acting Maori Party leader Te Ururoa Flavell said the bill was the best the party could negotiate in the circumstances and it was possible there would be “another time for our people to come back and have another go in the future”.

“We will certainly be looking at it again, as we will with all other policy positions we have at the moment. What happens after the next election, who knows? Anything can happen and we leave that to iwi to give us a lead on.”

How wonderful. So the Maori party have just opened the door to endless littigation on the foreshore and seabed. Because you can bet your bottom dollar that if they get a “better deal” later, it won’t have the support that the current law has and will have a higher chance of repeal once power changes hands. Then later the Maori party gets power again…

If I were John Key, I’d be seriously considering whether this bill was a government priority.

Update: One other thing.

However, the Green Party will oppose it. Co-leader Metiria Turei said it did not address the fundamental injustice of Maori losing ownership rights.

Funny how the Green Party is so into property rights only when they don’t (necessarily) exist.

“Selection” on the Judenrampe, Auschwitz, May/June 1944. To be sent to the right meant slave labor; to the left, the gas chambers. This image shows the arrival of Hungarian Jews from Carpatho-Ruthenia, many of them from the Berehov ghetto. It was taken by Ernst Hofmann or Bernhard Walter of the SS. Courtesy of Yad Vashem.[1]

The Maori Party has likened the plan to ban the wearing of gang patches in Wanganui to the targeting of Jews in World War II.

The comments came during debate in Parliament last night on a proposal by National MP Chester Borrows to ban the wearing of gang insignia in the city and follows the shooting of two-year-old Jhia Te Tua in a gang-related incident in the city last year.

Maori Party co-leader Tariana Turia opposed the proposal, telling Parliament that like the Jews, members of gangs would be punished for being members of a particular group.

“All this bill does, is to exclude, to suppress, to prohibit, to ban, to close your eyes and put up walls to force our problems out of sight, out of mind.”

Comparing a criminal group, where membership is voluntary, and that spends their time intimidating innocent people (and much worse) to a race that has undergone persecution for thousands of years, who suffered a mass slaughter of their people numbering in the millions – what was she thinking?

Time will tell what she actually meant by this, but on the face of it, this is offensive beyond words. She should know better – much, much better.

If this is reported as she said it, she should be thrown out of parliament. I’m tempted to describe exactly how, and what should happen afterwards but I will restrain myself.

In a statement released by the Maori Party, Dr Sharples was said to be disgusted by this week’s raids, which he said had set Maori and Pakeha race-relations back a hundred years.

Dr Sharples has here equated rounding up a few loose cannons with razing a settlement, and driving out it’s people.

His time would be far better spent flogging those who are stockpiling napalm, and trying to buy rocket launchers.

But instead, he engages in a reverse Winston, playing the anti-police card.

Disgusting.

That is not to say that the police should not be criticised for raiding houses unrelated to charges, or that the police should not be publicly flogged if these raids turn out to be someone abusing their power and inventing evidence.

But no one died. Sure, a few windows were broken and people’s feeling hurt. Some were insulted that police tried to talk in their native language. (dammed if you do…) But if the police are right, then the lives of tens, hundreds or perhaps thousands of Maori and Pakeha have been saved. The costs of sparking an armed conflict like Tame Iti seems to want are incalculable, just look at Northern Ireland or Iraq. Once started, they become very hard to stop, and if Mr Iti thinks Tuhoe would just be able to shrug off the blowback, he’s another thing comming.

No, race relations have not been set back 100 years. That was the goal of Tame Iti, and he has now been stopped. Pity Mr Sharples chooses to ignore that.

Hone Harawira’s outburst, on the other hand, was a red herring. If he had called Howard a statist or even fascist bastard we might have had the real debate which is about how heavy-handed should a government be in tackling problems that exist throughout society but disproportionately among indigenous, poor communities.

Anyone who listens to Willie Jackson and John Tamihere espousing their paternalistic solutions for Maori communities in south and west Auckland might wonder why Hone hasn’t labelled them racist. Jackson and Tamihere want to control the benefits going into dysfunctional Maori families, to link the receipt of welfare money to behaviours they see as desirable – getting the children to school, feeding them properly, not taking drugs and boozing till all hours and not neglecting or abusing their children.

If these two men were Pakeha they would no doubt have also drawn the wrath of Hone and the Maori Party by now. And while their ideas haven’t stretched yet to alcohol prohibition it is Hone himself who wants tobacco prohibition. Inasmuch as far more Maori smoke than Pakeha surely this, in Hone’s terms, is a racist policy too.

And that’s just it. Howard’s plan is a socialist’s wet dream. He’s just not the right colour to implement it.

The charge of racism is loosing it’s power these days in my opinion. The most trivial things are called racist these days. Pretty much anyone and any policy on the right is called racist, even if it has nothing to do with race.

In fact, there’s plenty of times when removing racial discrimination is called racist. Exhibit a: Don Brash. Heck, the guy is married to a Chinese woman.

Then there’s the “calling wolf” factor – some people just like calling people with white skin racist, and that’s that. They do it all the time, and no one cares.

So, if you’re going to just come out and call Australian Prime Minister is ‘racist bastard’, don’t be surprised if people

a) give a big yawn

b) treat you like a 5 year old

c) state that you should (like all other 5 year olds) not be in parliament.

Oh, and stating that you’re friends would take up an armed struggle against the government isn’t going to go down too well with your friends either – especially since those friends are actually sane.

This is a bit remiss of the DomPost. In the interests of fairness only one Maori MP should have been featured commensurate with their share of the general population. And only every eighth crime story should be about Maori, every eighth child abuse story about Maori, etc.

There can only be one conclusion to this:

Scrubone Hereby Declares the next 30 days* to be
“Mock a Politician” Month.

Perhaps the most startling fact was the one that was missing from the seven volumes of Budget promotional highlights. That missing fact is the calculation of how much of the Budget’s new funding has gone to Maori. So we added the ‘little bit’s up and found that of the $3.3 billion of new money, the specific allocation for Maori advancement was $18.57million per year. All up, it’s a grand total of 0.6% of the funding allocated to 14% of the population.

Hm, yes. Funny how all other budget spends are marked “Pakeha and Non-Maori Only”. Oh wait, no they aren’t.

That would mean that Maori get %14.6 of funding. I.e. they don’t get %13.4 less, they get %0.6 more than Pakeha do.

About this Blog

This Blog is the long time home of a blogger known across the internet as ScrubOne (That's Scrub One not Scru Bone). Where this handle has not been available, he is known as ScrubOneHD (HD for Half Done).

Other bloggers have occasionally been contributors.

ScrubOne confesses to the Christian faith, and conservative politics but does not necessarily blog according to public perception of either.

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